Dragana Bulut

Dragana Bulut is a choreographer, performer, researcher, and educator. Her practice unfolds at the intersection of choreography, affect theory, and embodied pedagogy. With a background in ballet, literary studies, contemporary dance, and artistic research, she develops performances and participatory formats that examine how emotional life is choreographed by economic structures, algorithmic systems, and cultural rituals. By transposing familiar social formats into theatrical, dialogic, or workshop-based contexts, she creates spaces that interrogate the commodification of emotions, the politics of knowledge production, and the subtle choreographies that shape social life. She understands choreography not just as an artistic discipline, but as a method of research and a pedagogical practice.

She holds a PhD in Artistic Research from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, where she developed the framework of Social Choreographies of Emotion—a methodological and artistic approach to understanding how affect circulates through bodies, institutions, and social structures. Her recent trilogy (Happyology – Tears of Joy, Behind Fear, Beyond Love) explores how happiness, fear, and love are mobilized, commodified, and resisted, often through immersive dramaturgies involving audience participation and AI-driven agents.

Bulut’s work has been presented at venues and festivals such as HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Black Box Theatre (Oslo), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Tanzquartier Wien (Vienna), Gessnerallee (Zürich), InTransit Festival (Berlin), PACT Zollverein (Essen), Museum Folkwang (Essen), Sophiensaele (Berlin), euro-scene Leipzig, Rampe Theater (Stuttgart), Laban Dance Centre (London), iDANS Festival (Istanbul), Fabrik (Potsdam), Danspace Project (New York), ENPARTS Campus at the Venice Biennale, eXplore Dance Festival (Bucharest), Bitef Festival (Belgrade), and the Balkan Dance Platform. As a performer, she has collaborated with artists including Tino Sehgal, Meg Stuart, and Ivo Dimchev.

She teaches and supervises at BA and MA levels, with past pedagogical engagements at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Freie Universität Berlin, HZT Berlin, Ruhr University Bochum, and Station Service for Contemporary Dance (Belgrade), among others. Her pedagogical approach is situated, experiential, and transdisciplinary—treating embodied research as a space for shared inquiry, critical literacy, and collective transformation.